Greg Hinz On Politics

There's no need to fear — unless there is

After six months of glorious wild speculation and rampant near-hysteria (man, you just don't get to use phrases like that often enough), Chicago's big moment is arriving.

The first protesters trickled into town over the weekend. The guard dogs and mounted police horses have been fed and watered, stacks of plywood sheathing for plate-glass windows secured and contingency plans for folks to work from home put into place.

It's NATO summit time, everybody, and we're about to find out if World War III is going to hit the Loop, or the whole mess will quickly blow away like an April snow.

The security folks—local police, Secret Service, et al.—haven't really said a lot except that Chicago will make it through. So I spent a chunk of last week talking to protest leaders to get a sense of what to expect. What follows is my best sense. But I caution that neither the police nor the protest leaders really know for sure because, unlike the preceding two groups, the anarchists in the black masks who are the real threat don't hold press conferences.

If you have business to conduct downtown—seeing the doctor, the banker, your broker or your bookie—don't bother from Friday afternoon through Monday.

It's not that things will be dangerous, although, on any given moment at any specific spot, they might be. Rather, it's that downtown and the area around McCormick Place will be crowded with swarms of protesters and probably thousands of coppers of all stripes, the latter trying to out-tough one another by firing off orders to innocent pedestrians. Not to mention VIP motorcades whizzing about.

A stream of small protests is scheduled, including a candlelight vigil for illegal immigrants in front of a federal holding facility in the West Loop on Tuesday, an anti-foreclosure march starting outside the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Wednesday, a protest of Alberta tar-sands development in front of the Canadian Consulate on Friday and a “shut down Boeing” rally at the defense contractor's West Loop headquarters on May 21.

The biggest event is Sunday's march from the Petrillo band shell in Grant Park to just west of McCormick Place. The crowd will be big; don't be surprised it if hits 15,000 to 20,000. But it's likely to be colorful and even “family-friendly,” as the CANG8 website promises. That assumes the city works out something with protesters to put up a stage with microphones at the end of the march so the marchers can be steered gently and gradually on their way home. If the city ends up refusing, trouble could occur, because thousands of folks will have nowhere to go.

What may be most important is what we don't know.

Protest leaders like Andy Thayer are loud and pushy—hey, they're having to deal with the likes of Rahm Emanuel—but are just trying to make their point. They don't have any better control of extremists, however, than Mitt Romney does over the GOP's right wing. That's why the possibility of smallish groups popping up here or there to smash and torch cannot be dismissed out of hand.

But Mr. Thayer makes a very valid point: “Both sides learned from 1968,” when the city got a lasting black eye that no one really wanted. Mr. Thayer aims that remark mostly at police. The ‘68 chant of “The whole world's watching” when the TV cameras came on has been replaced by a thousand tweets being posted. Even so, I don't get a sense that protest leaders want disorder.

One of those at last week's protesters' media conference was a fellow graybeard, Michael McConnell from the American Friends Service Committee. In the 40-plus years of Chicago protests since "68 and the Days of Rage a year later, only one turned really nasty, he recalls.

So c'mon down for the show or, if you prefer, watch it on TV. This becoming a world-class city actually is kinda interesting.